Wittgenstein bros help please I'm dumb

>>8817595
I'd recommend looking into Rorty. Wittgenstein's attempts to undermine metaphysics are in fact somewhat similar to the attempts of Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty (although Merleau-Ponty always seems to have idealistic undertones and never seems to gfully escapes its grasp). The details are too intricate to really do justice in a 4chan post, and I don't have time to go into too much detail, but I think Richard Rorty provides the best analysis ad can help you understand the underlying issues and arguments.

>>8818398
However, I will say this: we conceive of both speech act and mental states as of a "representational" nature. Of course we can always ground natural language in mental representation, but at some point the chain of representation has to stop, so to speak. At this point we wont be able to ground the notion of representation in terms of "content" or meaning, because this is what our analysis of representation is ultimately trying to explicate. At this point the "content" gives way to practices and relationship that are grounded in action or life or the world (or something like that) itself. Ultimately all signs, even mental ones must be completely arbitrary in that there is no connection between their phenomenological "content" and what they represent (no matter how convincing of similarity we may find). At this point "content" gives way to praxis.

(If this is filled with typos, forgive me, my keyboard is fucked up and I don't feel like rereading everything and trying to correct it a million times.)

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>Hegel


My god man! You actually went through with it? I tried to warn you.

>>8817595
Wittgenstein was a behaviorist, but this doesn't necessarily mean that he didn't think there was any "stuff" -- just that it isn't what we talk about when we talk about thinking and feeling. So long as your brackets are appropriately hard and fast, your bracketing is fine.
In any case, Wittgenstein isn't going to convince you that mental content is out there in the world, and he shouldn't. If you want some analytic support for what you seem to think are Kantian intuitions (but are really just common sense grounded in the experience that everyone seems to have) read Jerry Fodor's "Why There Must be a Private Language," and some of his other stuff on Wittgenstein

also, a theory of mental contents isn't really epistemology

>>8818398
>>8818419
>>8819192
Thanks bros. Helpful posts. Apologies for the wall of text. I don't expect responses to it, let alone a real dialogue. But maybe someone will skim over it and cut the Gordian knot for me.

I think part of the problem is that I'm being advised to stay the hell away from Kripke, Rorty, Quine, Fodor et al. (with whom I am at least somewhat familiar) for the time being and focus on more recent, revisionist interpretations of Wittgenstein. Like, vehemently, to stay the hell away from them as horrid misinterpreters.

A lot of what your posts say rings true as "more or less what my mind is trying to get at when I grapple with this subject" - but it's precisely what has been getting blasted by my professor whenever I fumble out a description of Wittgenstein's grammar as the always already of herm. phenomenology, or of Wittgensteinian symbols as Saussurean, or of rule-following as quasi-behaviorist, etc. I'm being advised STRONGLY that my idealism is queering the pitch of my comprehension.

>whatever-it-is-to-think as "praxis" / ambiguous / grounded in the world / bracketing mind-body problem
>theory of mental contents isn't really epistemology

The latter rings true of what I think Wittgenstein is getting at, but then immediately prompts me to say: "So, then, what is the praxis's actual relation to Consciousness Stuff?", which is precisely where I am exasperating the teacher. He is not saying to bracket them, he is saying that bracketing itself is incoherent and distorts your philosophical perception - because attempts to isolate or integrate geist und natur are as old as idealism, and really just a branch of it.

The latter confuses me, maybe in a revealing away: I literally can't conceive of how a phenomenology of the variety of mental "structures" and the "forms" taken by mental "acts" would NOT be a priority to epistemology. Maybe I'm misreading. Category-conceptual (Aristotle, Kant), function-conceptual (neo-Kantians/neo-Hegelians), these I understand. But they are predicated on a structural theory of the function of concepts and representation.

For example I study the epistemology of geometry a tiny bit. How is the transcendental aesthetic not relevant to thinking about "what our minds are doing" (here's me bracketing) when we imagine non-Euclidean geometries? If we're interested in extending our knowledge of the latter, and ultimately our EFFICACY at performing the latter, it would seem so fucking obvious that an introspective, internalist, phenomenological critique of mental contents is vitally necessary. So much of what Wittgenstein says is tantalising for how it demolishes cul-de-sacs of idealism on this note, but I just don't understand "okay, once he's done demolishing faulty idealism - how would Wittgenstein then begin talking about mental contents (i.e., idealism)?" Cue response: "You're still not getting it!"

>>8819341
my understanding is that the praxis either has no relation to the actual, consciousness stuff, or we can't talk about its relation to the actual consciousness stuff because we can't talk about the actual consciousness stuff, and the actual consciousness stuff may or may not exist -- in any case, again, we can't talk about it, and so what we're in fact talking about when we seem to be talking about the actual consciousness stuff is something else. what, precisely? well, either the praxis, the communal, out in the world stuff, or we literally have no idea what we're talking about
he isn't going out there and saying that all of the theses ever delivered about putative phenomena are false -- just that they're all either not about putative phenomena, and rather about praxis, or they aren't about anything (this is not to say they're false by reference failure, it's to say that they're meaningless)

>>8819414
When it's put that forcefully, I think I get it much more now. Both the way in which it's avoiding idealist "mentalist metaphysics" as a mire, and the way in which it's different from previous analytic/pragmatic formulations, another thing that always confused me. Sincerely thanks for this post, it pushed my mind into a place where I think I can just read the PI now.

>>8819135
And yes, I love Hegel but he's brain poison. I literally believe in ghosts and sentient rocks because of that asshole and the whole damn tradition after him.